Scholia Aristophanica. Arranged, edited, and translated Ly William G. Rutherford.
Vols. I. and II. (Macmillan and Co.) —Mr. Rutherford is the most original of British Greek scholars. He holds views about classical texts which it is not too much to call startling. Of these he has given us an illustrative sample in his dealing with Thucydides. He meditates something of the !same kind, only in a more complete and elaborate fashion, in the case of Aristophanes. To the scholia, which he has here " arranged and emended," he attaches, we learn, no value from an exegetical and literary point of view. But he says "nothing can be imagined better fitted than a study of scholia to bring home to a critical scholar the precariousness of all conclusions resting merely upon collation of manuscripts Familiarity with printing has made it difficult to realise the conditions attaching to the transmission of literature by handwriting." But for the "speculations and theories" which are being constructed on this foundation, we have to wait for a third volume. What we have in the two before us is a text of the scholia from the Coder Ravennas (for the collation of which Mr. Rutherford makes a full acknowledgment to Dr. Hans Graeven), a continuous critical commentary, and a translation, which we are glad indeed to get, but which it seems hardly consistent with the editor's mean opinion of the material value of the scholia as opposed to their form to have troubled himself to give.
Previous page
